[math4] teacher recruitment letter

[Mel Chua]

In case it helps, here is the email I'm using to ask for edu folk. It is 
mostly copypastes of Caroline and Greg because they're more eloquent and 
I'm getting RSI. ;)

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The project i mentioned the other day is 
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Math4Team - teams of teachers and coders 
working on games that can be used to achieve MA 4th grade math 
standards. (Most of the coders are RIT students with development 
experience doing this for a CS course.) This is a short timeframe thing; 
work has already started and we should be finished with the first wave 
of games before summer.

The way forward is to pair, say, 2 teachers and 4 developers together in 
teams of 6 to build activities that map *directly* to clear objectives, 
as defined by the curriculum framework:

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Math4Team/Resources/CurriculumChart

The goal is for each of these objectives to have one or more software 
activities that can be used to teach/learn it - it won't be perfect 
coverage, won't fit all learners, but it will be a start and more 
importantly be generative, and show other groups that they can do this 
too and make things that fit for their schools, grades, subjects, and 
standards.

Most (if not all) discussion is happening on the mailing list, 
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/fourthgrademath. You can read the 
(short) archives at http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/fourthgrademath/.

The nice thing about the open source model is that these activities 
don't have to be perfect.  In fact, they *shouldn't* be perfect.  They 
should be experimental.  They should be moving targets.  They should 
come together quickly.  They should be simple, and numerous.  Over time, 
it will become clear which ones have the most momentum, because people 
will actually be using them, and ultimately we will polish those gems 
that our community find most useful.

And although the activities should not be perfect, they should be very
thoughtful. That is full of thought about why what you are trying might 
work for learning.  Team members should be thinking together about 
learning and it would be great if we could transfer some of those 
thoughts to the next person who picks up the activity and improves it. 
Maybe the next person will also improve or have a different view of the 
pedagogy of the activity too.

The thing we're looking for, specifically, is people from the education 
field who are willing to sit down with developers, share their ideas up 
front to give developers a direction to move towards, and then who will 
commit to playing with and giving feedback on the resultant activities 
as they take shape, maybe meeting online with coding teams every few 
weeks. Actual teachers of fourth graders would be especially wonderful, 
or those in school to become teachers - edu tech folks and instructional 
designers would be great as well.

You mentioned you had some people in mind?

Thanks for forwarding!